Global Outage Disrupts the Services of Major Websites

 

Several major websites faced outages on Thursday due to a glitch in Akamai Technologies Inc's (AKAM.O) systems, the second widespread outage linked to the cloud company in two months. Affected websites included DraftKings, Airbnb, FedEx, Delta, Barclays, and the PlayStation network used for online games. 

"We have implemented a fix for this issue, and based on current observations, the service is resuming normal operations," Akamai tweeted. 

The disruption was caused by a vulnerability in the domain name system (DNS) service, designed to keep websites, apps, and services running smoothly and securely, that was triggered during a software update and lasted up to an hour.

DNS services play a vital role in the functioning of the internet, but are known to have bugs and can be easily exploited by threat actors. Companies like Akamai have designed their own DNS services that are meant to solve some of these problems for their users. But when things go south or there’s an outage, it can cause a knock-on effect to all of the customer websites and services that rely on it.

Akamai said it was “actively investigating the issue,” but when reached a spokesperson, he would not say if its outage was the cause of the disruption to other sites and services that are currently offline. However, a spokesperson for ThousandEyes, an internet monitoring company bought by Cisco in 2020, attributed the outage to Akamai.

Major internet companies such as Zomato, Paytm, Disney+ Hotstar, Sony LIV were also affected due to issues with Akamai Technologies. Other affected services reported by Internet outage monitoring platform DownDetector included Banks such as Lloyds, TSB, and Halifax, gaming services including Steam, Call of Duty, and EA, and streaming services on Channel 4 and ITV.

In June, cloud computing provider Fastly had an interrupted service that took down social media, government, and news websites across the globe. In that case, it later emerged that settings change by one customer had inadvertently affected the entire infrastructure. Last year Cloudflare, which also offers networking services to companies across the globe, had a similar outage following a vulnerability that caused major sites to stop loading, including Shopify, Discord, and Politico.

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